Is the swine flu a threat?

I guess I'm doomed.

These are mostly old and frail people who would have died within a few years anyway. In case of pandemic flu many young people will die.

This is interesting. Some of the California cases are here in San Diego County, where I live. Yesterday I was out at a street festival and there was a guy with a pet pig on a leash, walking it around like a dog.

Can pigs catch swine flu from humans?

Read the book The Hot Zone and you will see why the CDC is taking this seriously.

Pretty scary stuff, the Influenza that is.

Yes I read that book, it's very informative. In 1918 we didn't have large numbers of people flying from continent to continent, like we do now. Yet it's terrifying how quickly the pandemic of that time spread.

UC Berkeley Demographer Finds Undetected Tuberculosis May Have Been Real Killer in 1918 Flu Epidemic

Actually tuberculosis was a major killer at that time too. The public didn't have access to medical care needed to treat the symptoms.

I found this interesting.



http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept...r/389/flu.html

I wonder how much of the population at that time could have already been weakened by undetected tuberculosis and therefore at a greater risk of complications?

Don't forget how primitive medicine was in 1918.

Very interesting link. I wonder, does "garden variety" flu pose an increased risk of death to a person with TB?

Noymer's findings explain a peculiarity of the 1918 pandemic that killed at least 20 million people worldwide.

Normally, the influenza virus is not lethal to young and middle-aged people. Most of its victims are elderly. But in 1918, the typical victim was a man between the ages of 20 and 40, a group that normally has a very low death rate, said Noymer.

In the early 20th century, however, tuberculosis was a major killer of men in that age group, apparently because of transmission in factories where men worked in densely-packed, poorly-ventilated conditions, Noymer said. Men were about 30 percent more likely to die from TB than women were-a pattern closely paralleled during the flu epidemic.

In 1918, men were 35 percent more likely than women to die from flu. Of the 500,000 Americans who died that year, 280,000-300,000 were men.

"This can't be a coincidence," said Noymer. "I think TB is the missing piece of the puzzle. It explains why younger people, especially men, died in such great numbers. Scientists since 1918 have been searching for clues for why the 1918 epidemic was so deadly, especially in middle age. But people did not look at what happened to tuberculosis death rates, not only in the epidemic year, but in the years afterwards."

His findings explain another mystery. Scientists who have attempted to study the gene sequence of the 1918 influenza virus have seen nothing out of the ordinary, nothing to explain the flu's virulence.

"Never before or since have we seen a flu epidemic that was so virulent," said Noymer. "The spread was extremely rapid, as was the development of the infection. Almost everyone who died was gone in two weeks.

"I do believe my finding explains most of the deadliness of the 1918 epidemic. It doesn't prove that, if another strain were to appear, that the U.S. population would be safe, but it strongly suggests that we would fare much better."

Noymer's analysis shows that the 500,000 people who died in 1918 were almost exactly the number who would have been in various stages of disease from TB. Using pre-1918 death rates, Noymer calculated that 500,000 more TB deaths would have occurred between 1918 and 1932 had there never been a flu epidemic.

As a result of the excess death among men in 1918, a healthier male population was left, said Noymer. For years afterward, the life expectancy of men, which usually lagged behind women by six years, moved up to more closely resemble the female pattern. It was this startling change that sparked Noymer's research, when he saw something no demographer had ever noticed before - a precipitous drop in 1919 in the gender differential from six to two years.

"When I saw that," said Noymer, " I said to myself, 'That's the flu!' And, surprise, surprise, it leaves the same mortality patterns on age and sex that TB does."

Co-author on the article is Michel Garenne, senior researcher at the French center for population and development studies, CEPED, Centre français sur la population et le développement.

In Mexico they have about 80 deaths out of 1300 which is not inconsistent with no deaths out of a dozen or so in the US.

Are you an infant, over the age or 65? Do you have chronic pulmonary disorder?

Didn't think so.

Epidemiologists are particularly concerned because the only fatalities so far were in young people and adults.

According to my wife (who is somewhat involved in all this), this flu has killed mostly young adults in Mexico. She said that young adults in the modern World have less resistance to attack by severe flu since they have suffered less exposure to infectious disease than older people so it is possible to get a bad reaction.

See:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090424/.../med_swine_flu

The above article said this:

In the past, severe pandemics also seem to have targeted young adults.

Young adults that possibly already had tuberculosis.

http://www.library.csi.cuny.edu/dept...r/389/flu.html

I've read that when a new pandemic virus arises, the immune system is slow to detect it in your body. Then, when your immune system does finally react, that reaction is the strongest in younger people, because the immune system is operating at maximum strength and that maximum strength is stronger if you are between 20 and 40.

This immune response is then so strong that it damages the lungs. Then fluids leak into the lungs and you suffocate to death.